26 ( ct'ya JAMES THVRBER PEOPLE HAVE MORE FVN THAN ANYBODY A Centennial Celebration of Drawings and Writings Edtted by Michael J Rosen Being a hundred or so never before collected drawings and writings a veritable kennel of good dogs, ce lebrtty guests, a thousand or more laughs, severa1 potgnant revelations and Thurber s favorite birthday cake. With eighteen prose pieces and over seventy-five drawings. \ MQ ('0 HARCOURT ; /9/9- \ BRACE V994 -< \ ç....,.,," -&' Nearly all of the contents of this book originally appeared in The New Yorker. ANNALS OF COMMUNICATIONS BACK IN PLAY Barry Diller has said that network broadcasting is the past so what does he see for CBS? And what will happen now that Larry Tisch has put CBS tn play? BY KEN AULETfA X is true of any enabling relation- ship, Laurence A. Tisch, the chairman of CBS, and Barry Diller, the charrman of the QYC home- shopping network, needed each other in order to go on to something else. Tisch, bruised by criticism that he lacked vision and was too miserly to run a network, wanted to extricate himself from a souring rela- tionship with CBS. Joining forces with Diller, in a merger an- nounced at the end of last month, gave him a way to depart from CBS without appear- ing to have fled a fail- ure; now he could ap- pear to be a statesman who would be leaving CBS in strong hands. As for Diller, he needed a larger plat- form for his talents than QYC allowed, particularly since its meteoric rise may have stalled. "They are saving each other," Christopher Dixon, Paine- Webber's media and entertainment ana- lyst, says of Tisch and Diller. The motivation for this union is two parts emotion and one part economics. If Tisch had been thinking only of the economics, he might have demanded a steeper purchase price for CBS than the one he engtneered with Diller-a hun- dred and seventy-five dollars a share in cash and a stock swap between the two companies. He might also have cashed out all his CBS stock-through the family-held Loews Corporation, he owns twenty per cent of the company- instead of retaining 9.4 per cent. But emotion, too, was involved. While Tisch has never been known as a jolly man, those who have worked alongside him at CBS say that he has been especially unhappy of late. He was furious when, last December, he had to choose be- tween continuing to lose as much as a hundred and fifty million dollars a year by televising N ational Football League games and losing the television rights to those games-which CBS had broad- cast for thirty-eight years-to Rupert Murdoch's Fox network. The N.F.L. went to Fox. Then, in May, Tisch lost eight CBS-affiliated stations when the financier Ronald Perelman's New World Com- munications Group shifted its allegiance to Fox-a move that triggered the kind of bidding war for affili- ates among the net- works that Tisch had entered the business vowing to end. Tisch did, of course, have his successes at CBS: he recfUlted some accomplished managers; he opened his wallet and allowed Howard Stringer, the CBS broadcast president, to lure David Letterman away from NBC; he presided over CBS's third straight prime-time-ratings triumph; and CBS, according to a ranking offi- cial there, earned three hundred and twenty-five million dollars last year and IS expected to earn slightly more than that in 1994. Nevertheless, Tisch could hear a mounting chorus of criticism. CBS's hit shows had begun to slip in the ratings Its sports division was devastated by the loss of the N.F.L. games. Its nightly newscast, once the pride of the network, was flipping between second and third place. The affiliates were restive. By selling off CBS's non-broadcasting divisions-CBS Records, the magazine division, the regional cable sports net- works, and the book division-Tisch had invited the charge that he lacked (/) vision. Then, when he declared that he was earning at least nine per cent inter-